


Smelling Salts

by whitachi



Category: Final Fantasy XII
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-12
Updated: 2013-05-12
Packaged: 2017-12-11 14:41:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 517
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/799859
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitachi/pseuds/whitachi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beware of malboros!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Smelling Salts

When sense came back to him at last, Basch first felt the wet earth beneath him, then the soft rasp of velvet against his cheek, and then droplets of wetness falling across his eyes. His sight returned in steps, like the removal of layers of veils from over his eyes, and when he could at last focus, he saw Larsa smiling down at him. 

"Ah, good, you're back with us at last," he said, and replaced the phial of eye drops into his pack. Basch tried to pull himself up to sitting, but found the movement made his head swim. "Rest a bit longer," Larsa said, and looked of a little downward from where they lay. "The others are still recovering as well."

"That..." Basch blinked his eyes until the last of the gauzy haze had left him, and looked further down the Golmore's path to see Balthier in a similar state as he, being fretted over by Penelo. "That was no regular malboro." Larsa let out a brief laugh as he delved within his pack again for another phial, this the familiar heavy blue glass of a healing potion.

"I daresay it was not," the boy said as he raised up Basch's arm to tend to an angry red welt left there by the lash of the vicious vegetable's tentacles. "Fran said it was one grown very old... one that had _fermented_ , she said." Basch felt himself come more alive just as the sharp, herbal smell of the uncapped potion reached his nostrils; the odd cooling burn of it spread across his skin was a stinging relief.

"Did I kill it, at least?" Larsa replaced the empty phial and came forth with a bandage to wrap 'round Basch's arm. It was an odd boon that a young man of such high station should come prepared for tending the hurts of battle. His sword-arm was as strong as his medicine, as well; Basch could only wonder what, indeed, they taught to the heirs of Archadia. He flexed his hand as full feeling and strength slowly came back to his muscles.

"Oh, I daresay you did," Larsa said, and Basch looked to his face to find his small mouth quirked, and looked at him further until he allowed a laugh to escape. "You dealt with the malboro quite handily, Basch, but after it was destroyed, you were still under the effect of its toxin. You were blind and clearly addled, and you set upon poor Balthier as your next target." The sky pirate had managed to bring himself to sitting as well, and Basch saw now that it was not malboro lashes that marked him, but rather a lump on his head and the start of a black eye. "Fran had to strike you before you would cease." Ah, and that would be the source of the aching in his own skull--the viera's own ungraceful form of smelling salts.

Basch brought himself up from Larsa's lap at last, with only the faintest grumble to the lump in his scalp. "I shall... have to owe him a drink."


End file.
